How do you know if someone is a San Franciscan native? In all likelihood, a true native will tell you, but also, natives of liberal american cities like our own are significantly less likely to be married by age 26 than the average American.

That's according to a new study published in the New York Times, an attempt to correlate where Americans grew up with their probability of tying the knot by that (admittedly young) age. Here in the Bay Area, apparently, it is not a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. A husband, maybe. But it isn't exactly marriageability — who wouldn't want to marry a "Sucka Free City" native — so much as it is politics at play. From the Times,

The most striking geographical pattern on marriage, as with so many other issues today, is the partisan divide. Spending childhood nearly anywhere in blue America... makes people about 10 percentage points less likely to marry relative to the rest of the country.

According to the data, which is based on analysis from numbers compiled by Harvard economists, if you grew up in San Francisco proper, you're 9 percentage points less likely than the national average to be tied down at 26. That's in comparison to, for example, Salt Lake County, Utah, where natives are 9 percentage points more likely to marry.

And, what's more, if you haven't found a suitable, state-sanctioned spouse by that age, it might be a long time until you do... if you (choose to) at all. Writes the Times,

It does not seem to simply delay marriage; the researchers found very similar patterns when they looked at the data up to age 30. The places that made marriage more likely at 26 also tended to make it more likely at age 30. The children in the study aren’t yet old enough for conclusions beyond age 30. But the best guess for now is that these differences aren’t only about timing.

You know, staying single is great for some people.